In a collaboration between Japan's Softbank Robotics and French-based Aldebaran Robotics, Pepper was officially put on the market for domestic use in June of 2015. Priced at about 1,600 with 200 in monthly data and insurance fees, the first thousand models available for launch sold out in under a minute. The company has stated that they aim to keep Pepper affordable, comparing the cost of the robot to that of a pet dog in Japan. Outside of personal ownership, the android has been used to assist Japanese citizens in banks and shops, including the promotion of Nescafe coffee machine sales. And in a limited run, large-scale experiment, Softbank opened a phone shop staffed exclusively by Pepper robots.

Kudos to the Mr Robot production team, who are finding new ways to make us feel very excited about what's going to happen in season two. But yesterday, a new'command' input appeared on the site: fivenine. It refers to the date (9th May, or 5/9 in US date format). Type in'fivenine', press enter, and see how Mr Robot just raised its marketing game. Yes, that is President Barack Obama talking about an "attack" that will "affect our economy in ways that are extraordinarily significant". You can go to the video directly using this link.

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) There is no doubt that machines and robots are better than humans when it comes to speed and efficiency because they don't get tired. In fact, many fear that artificial intelligence or AI will take over the workforce. Will there be a job that is impossible for AI to take over? Do you think AI will be a good teacher?

The future is closer than we think, said Kevin Ho -- and it's not going to be terrifying at all, he claims. Life today would be unimaginable for people from a few decades or a few centuries ago, explained Ho, President of Huawei's handset line, speaking Wednesday morning at the CES Asia 2016 event in Shanghai, China. Just imagine trying to explain ships and trains and even airplanes, all of which would have been terrifying to someone from 10,000 years ago. Then imagine bringing that same person to the modern world. "What if coming to today's society, somebody showed you a black box -- a smartphone -- with video phone functionality? What would people from ancient society think knowing that we can fly?" he asked the crowd.

As the adoption of sentiment analysis continues to spread across industries, from politics to PR, opinions about the field also run deep. That's especially true among practitioners, and a range of academic and vendor specialists weighed in at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York last week. While the novelty factor begins to subside, clients are looking for more substance, and as befitting such a multifaceted topic, it's complicated. As a follow-up to yesterday's post that covered the analysis of visual images and facial coding, here the experts offered their perspectives on approaching 5 ongoing issues: The degree of accuracy issue is hard to answer, said Bing Liu, a University of Chicago computer science professor specializing in data mining. It depends on what you're measuring, the level of text you're analyzing, the number of data sets across domains and the voice sound quality of videos, among other variables.

Novel thinkers and pioneers in brain research, technology, healthcare and the economy will gather this month in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the third conference of The Brain Forum. The forum, on May 26 and 27, will also be attended by researchers, engineers, healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, industrialists, investors, funding agencies and policy makers to advance the understanding of how the brain works and to accelerate the application and value of this knowledge in society and the economy. The event will be divided into two sections – with Day 1 focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation, and Day 2 on new advances in science and technology. During Day 1, the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Day, entrepreneurs and investors will share their expertise in translating science into business, and discuss their ideas for the future. The keynote lecture'Practical lessons in machine learning', will be presented by Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and scalable machine learning at Google Research, and will explore aspects of machine learning – upon which much of Google's work on language, speech, translation, visual processing, ranking and prediction relies.

TORONTO – A dating website is pledging to match Americans who can't live with a Donald Trump presidency to Canadians looking for love, facilitating the pledge often made by U.S. voters to move to Canada if the real estate billionaire is elected. "Maple Match makes it easy for Americans to find the ideal Canadian partner to save them from the unfathomable horror of a Trump presidency," the Maple Match website reads, before offering a waiting list for interested singles. Trump's bombastic campaign to lead the Republican Party to the November presidential election has alarmed some Americans, both liberals and those in his own party, and the pledge by some to move to Canada if he is elected has gathered steam. In February, the island of Cape Breton on Canada's Atlantic coast marketed itself as a tranquil refuge for Americans seeking to escape should Trump capture the White House. The Maple Match website allows users to add their name to a wait list matching dismayed U.S. voters with interested single Canadians, adding "We'll let you know the next steps soon!" Officials with Maple Match did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Chief Executive Joe Goldman told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that more than 10,000 singles and about 2,500 Canadians had signed up for the website's waiting list as of Tuesday morning.

There's plenty of lip service paid to the need to mobile-enable the enterprise, but actually making that happen is a little more complicated. That's where PowWow Mobile hopes to help. The startup on Wednesday launched SmartUX, a platform that taps machine learning to help companies turn their legacy Web and Windows apps into mobile-optimized ones without writing any code. Along the way, PowWow promises that it can save months of development time and more than 70 percent of development costs. The platform's core tool is SmartUX Studio.

There are some adverse conditions, such as heat and fog, and the urban roads can be heavily trafficked. But by and large, it's a very car-friendly place: The streets are relatively well-paved and marked, and they aren't as clogged with unpredictable bicycle, pedestrian, or rickshaw traffic as those of many other big cities around the world. Oh, and the government is an absolute monarchy that can more or less impose its will on the populace.

Imagine workers who don't pay taxes, with no IRS worries. Or who don't get paid for overtime. Now, imagine a robot on the job. "Robotics will be a revolution for our economy and in the way we think and act," said Randy Bateman, an economist who is the CEO and president of Balcones Investment Research. Bateman, appearing recently on a futuristic panel discussion titled "Will a Robot Take Your Job?" at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, expects the robotics industry to spearhead the next great transformative stage of our workforce.